It looks like the main author of this law is facing a disbarring for his actions (specifically for claiming to the Tribunal that one of the judges was a communist informant, while knowing of a document in which SB labeled this judge as unfit and unwilling to cooperate. Said judge has been premptively excluded from proceedings).

^ He does have a good line though to say in his own defense: IPN archive had data about the judge in questin. It was NOT up to him to decide or to interpretate such documents; he was informing about data being stored and acumulated by secret police.

He has no good line of defense. He requested two judges to be excluded from the proceedings on the basis that they were communist snitches, citing the IPN data. So, either he was not fully aware what was in the papers (which means he did not do his due dilligence while researching, which is disqualifying), or, he was fully aware of it and liedrt (which is criminal). Either way his actions are injustifiable.

(And in my opinion he should be charged with libel and lying to the court).

When I studied history, our profs insisted that we students take every source seriously, but never at face value. If someone violated this fundamental principle of "source criticism" in a seminar paper, he'd get it back with a "zero" mark.

So I couldn't trust my eyes when I read that today's head of the IPN - according to press reports, a graduated historian - some weeks ago swept away every source criticism directed towards the SB files, publicly stating that these files "are absolutely trustworthy." Do historians on the banks of the Vistula work according to other standards than in Western Europe?

I think the 'open the bloody files' point of view has become dominant now as people are just sick to the teeth of the whole thing and want it over with. That way there would transparency. WE can judge for ourselves who did what or if these files are even worth bothering about at all.

I am worried that opening the files to one and all was part of the PiS masterplan all along. A child, much less a heavy weight Constitutional Tribune judge, could see that the lustration law was rubbish. So why go ahead with it? To soften the public up to opening the archives. Many opponents of the now dead law were quick to insist that "I have nothing against lustration itself." They will now have a very hard time opposing an archival free for all.

Maybe the archives should indeed be opened - questions of privacy protection and how to interpret the secret police files aside - but it sticks in my gullet to think that that was what Kaczyński wanted all along...

to Europejczyk: "head of the IPN - according to press reports, a graduated historian - some weeks ago swept away every source criticism directed towards the SB files, publicly stating that these files "are absolutely trustworthy."

Hmmmm... so how Mr. Kurtyka would treat Jaroslaw Kaczynski's file (with a 'loyalty document signed by JK)??? Apparently this one was fake. Maybe this is ONLY ONE that is false in all 83km of SB files? Things like this happen in this country.